Inside Health

OP-ED COLUMNIST; Welcome to Confederate History Month

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 18, 2010

It's kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap ''Dallas,'' where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season's episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month -- the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress -- was also a mirage.

Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it's now a blogosphere ''fact'' that Lewis is a liar and the ''lamestream media'' concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer -- spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank -- but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!

''It's Not About Race'' declared a headline on a typical column defending over-the-top ''Obamacare'' opponents from critics like me, who had the nerve to suggest a possible racial motive in the rage aimed at the likes of Lewis and Cleaver -- neither of whom were major players in the Democrats' health care campaign. It's also mistaken, it seems, for anyone to posit that race might be animating anti-Obama hotheads like those who packed assault weapons at presidential town hall meetings on health care last summer. And surely it is outrageous for anyone to argue that conservative leaders are enabling such extremism by remaining silent or egging it on with cries of ''Reload!'' to pander to the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base. As Beck has said, it's Obama who is the real racist.

I would be more than happy to stand corrected. But the story of race and the right did not, alas, end with the health care bill. Hardly had we been told that all that ugliness was a fantasy than we learned back in the material world that the new Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, had issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month.

In doing so, he was resuscitating a dormant practice that had been initiated in 1997 by George Allen, the Virginia governor whose political career would implode in 2006 when he was caught on camera calling an Indian-American constituent ''macaca.'' McDonnell had been widely hailed by his party as a refreshing new ''big tent'' conservative star when he took office in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, in January. So perhaps his Dixiecrat proclamation, if not a dream, might have been a staff-driven gaffe rather than a deliberate act of racial provocation.

That hope evaporated once McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring ''the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.'' After acknowledging that slavery was among ''any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,'' the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues ''I thought were most significant for Virginia.'' Only when some of his own black supportersjoined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too -- a fifth of the state's population is black -- did he beat a retreat and apologize.

But his original point had been successfully volleyed, and it was not an innocent mistake. McDonnell's words have a well-worn provenance. In ''Race and Reunion,'' the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war's history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states' rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South's ''sense of rights under the Constitution.'' The editorial contained not ''a single mention of slavery or black freedom,'' Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since.

McDonnell isn't a native Virginian but he received his master's and law degrees at Pat Robertson's university in Virginia Beach during the 1980s, when Robertson was still a rare public defender of South Africa's apartheid regime. As a major donor to McDonnell's campaign and an invited guest to his Inaugural breakfast, Robertson is closer politically to his prot? than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever was to Barack Obama. McDonnell chose his language knowingly when initially trying to justify his vision of Confederate History Month. His sanitized spin on the Civil War could not have been better framed to appeal to an unreconstructed white cohort that, while much diminished in the 21st century, popped back out of the closet during the Obama ascendancy.

But once again you'd have to look hard to find any conservative leader who criticized McDonnell for playing with racial fire. Instead, another Southern governor -- who, as it happened, had issued a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation of his own -- took up his defense. The whole incident didn't ''amount to diddly,'' said Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, when asked about it by Candy Crowley of CNN last weekend.